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Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion — A Closer Reading

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Authors: Plaatje, Sol. T. (Solomon Tshekisho), 1876-1932 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 1998 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Indigenous peoples -- South Africa -- Social conditions -- 20th century; South Africa -- Politics and government -- 1836-1909; Black people -- South Africa -- Social conditions -- 20th century; Land tenure -- Law and legislation -- South Africa; South Africa -- History -- Rebellion, 1914-1915; South Africa -- Politics and government -- 1909-1948 Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 137,439

Reading time 598 min

Text sections 12

For Native Life in South Africa Before and Since the European War and the Boer Rebellion — A Closer Reading, the stored edition analysis reports 137,439 words, 9 hr 58 min estimated reading time, and 12 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 25.7 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Indigenous peoples -- South Africa -- Social conditions -- 20th century,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #1452

Sol Plaatje's 1914 exposé of the Natives' Land Act uses parliamentary transcripts, personal testimony, and shifting scenes between South Africa and Britain to reveal the law's devastating impact on black land ownership and mobility.

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Plaatje was increasingly drawn to the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois, president of the NAACP in the United States. In 1921 Plaatje sailed for the United States on a lecture tour that took him through half the country. He paid his own way by publishing and selling 18,000 copies of a booklet titled "The Mote and the Beam: an Epic on Sex-Relationship 'twixt Black and White in British South Africa" at 25 cents each. In the following year, after Plaatje had left, this new edition of "Native Life in South Africa" was published, by the NAACP newspaper "The Crisis" edited by Du Bois.

Plaatje returned home to Kimberley to find the SANNC a spent force, despite its name change to ANC, overtaken by more radical forces. At a time when white power was pushing ahead with an ever more intense segregationist programme, based on anti-black legislation, Plaatje became a lone voice for old black liberalism. He turned from politics and devoted the rest of his life to literature. His passion for Shakespeare resulted in mellifluous Tswana translations of five plays from "Comedy of Errors" to "Merchant of Venice" and "Julius Caesar". His passion for the history of his people, and of his family in particular, resulted in a historical novel, "Mhudi (An Epic of South African Native Life a Hundred Years Ago)", dedicated to his daughter Olive who had died in the influenza epidemic while Plaatje was overseas -- described in the dedication as "one of the many victims of a settled system".

"Mhudi" was published by the missionary press at Lovedale in 1930, in a somewhat bowdlerized version. It has since been republished in more pristine form and is today considered not just the first but one of the very best novels published by a black South African writer in English.

Plaatje lived an extraordinary life but died a largely disappointed man. His feats of political journalism had been largely forgotten and his creative talents had hardly yet been recognised -- except in the confined world of Tswana language readership. But today Plaatje is regarded as a South African literary pioneer, as a not insignificant political actor in his time, and as a cogent commentator on his times. He was an explorer in a fascinating world of cultural and linguistic interaction, who was in retrospect truly a "renaissance man".

Sol T. Plaatje (ed. John Comaroff with Brian Willan & Andrew Reed), "Mafeking Diary: a Black Man's View of a White Man's War", Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press & Cambridge Meridor Press, 1990. (1st edn. London: Macmillan, 1973, publ. as The Boer War Diary of Sol T. Plaatje).

Sol. T. Plaatje (ed. Tim Couzens), "Mhudi", Cape Town: Francolin, 1996; definitive edition.

Brian Willan, "Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist, 1876-1932", London: Heinemann, 1984.

Brian Willan (ed. & comp.), "Sol Plaatje: Selected Writings", Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1996.

Neil Parsons is a Professor of History at the University of Botswana. He is author of "King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen", which details the journey of the Batswana delegation to England of 1895, and other books relating to the history of the region.

To Miss Harriette E. Colenso, "Nkosazana Matotoba ka So-Bantu", Daughter of the late Rt. Rev. J. W. Colenso (In his life-time Bishop of Natal and "Father of the Zulus").

In recognition of her unswerving loyalty to the policy of her late distinguished father and unselfish interest in the welfare of the South African Natives,

This Book is Dedicated.

(A) Who is the Author? (B) Prologue Chapter I A Retrospect Chapter II The Grim Struggle between Right and Wrong, and the Latter Carries the Day Chapter III The Natives' Land Act Chapter IV One Night with the Fugitives Chapter V Another Night with the Sufferers Chapter VI Our Indebtedness to White Women Chapter VII Persecution of Coloured Women in the Orange Free State Chapter VIII At Thaba Ncho: A Secretarial Fiasco Chapter IX The Fateful 13 Chapter X Dr. Abdurahman, President of the A.P.O. / Dr. A. Abdurahman, M.P.C. Chapter XI The Natives' Land Act in Cape Colony Chapter XII The Passing of Cape Ideals Chapter XIII Mr. Tengo-Jabavu, the Pioneer Native Pressman Chapter XIV The Native Congress and the Union Government Chapter XV The Kimberley Congress / The Kimberley Conference Chapter XVI The Appeal for Imperial Protection Chapter XVII The London Press and the Natives' Land Act Chapter XVIII The P.S.A. and Brotherhoods Chapter XIX Armed Natives in the South African War Chapter XX The South African Races and the European War Chapter XXI Coloured People's Help Rejected / The Offer of Assistance by the South African Coloured Races Rejected Chapter XXII The South African Boers and the European War Chapter XXIII The Boer Rebellion Chapter XXIV Piet Grobler Epilogue Report of the Lands Commission

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Native Life in South Africa

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Sol Plaatje's Native Life in South Africa opens not with a narrative but with a structural paradox: a book written to sway British public opinion against the Natives' Land Act of 1913, yet forced to accommodate the distractions of the First World War. The work moves between two geographies—the South African landscape where families are evicted and the London parliamentary chamber where colonial secretaries deflect appeals. Plaatje embeds verbatim House of Commons debates, complete with interruptions and editorial asides, creating a text that is part polemic, part documentary record.

The Act as a Turning Point in Structure

The Natives' Land Act is not merely a subject but the structural hinge of the book. Plaatje organizes his evidence around its passage and immediate aftermath, using the Act as a chronological anchor. The text repeatedly returns to the date of its enactment—June 19, 1913—as a before-and-after marker. This temporal framing allows Plaatje to contrast pre-Act land tenure, where black farmers could purchase or rent land outside reserves, with the post-Act reality of forced removals and confinement to "scheduled areas" described as "consisting largely of wasteland." The Act's provisions become a recurring reference point against which every anecdote, petition, and parliamentary exchange is measured.

Parliamentary Transcripts as Evidence and Weapon

Plaatje reproduces extended passages from House of Commons debates, including the Colonial Secretary's claim that the Act "is practically doing no more than carrying out" the Lagden Commission's recommendations. But he does not let the official record stand unchallenged. Footnotes and bracketed interjections puncture the speeches: when Harcourt says the Act cannot be suspended because the inquiry period has expired, Plaatje notes that the Natives never asked for a full suspension, only for the harshest clauses to be paused. This technique turns the parliamentary transcript into a contested document, where the author's editorial voice competes with the minister's evasions.

Movement Between South Africa and Britain

The book's geography mirrors the deputation's journey: from the farms and reserves of South Africa to the corridors of Imperial power in London. Plaatje shifts between scenes of rural displacement—families losing their homes, livestock, and access to land—and the formal language of British governance. This oscillation creates a tension between lived experience and bureaucratic abstraction. The author himself is a figure in motion, writing the book en route to Britain, and the text retains the urgency of a document composed during travel, with references to the war's outbreak altering the political landscape even as the deputation tries to make its case.

Recurring Images of Dispossession and Loss

Throughout the excerpts, Plaatje returns to concrete details of what the Land Act destroys: the right to buy land, the ability to rent, the security of tenure that allowed families to farm. These losses are not abstract—they are tied to specific legal clauses and their effects on named individuals and communities. The image of the "native area" shrinking to wasteland recurs, as does the figure of the landless family forced onto reserves. Plaatje also emphasizes the Act's temporariness—it was framed as a "temporary measure" pending a commission report—yet the book's evidence shows how provisional restrictions become permanent when political will is absent.

Readers should attend to the way Plaatje weaves official documents with personal observation, creating a hybrid form that is neither pure report nor pure memoir. The book's power lies in its refusal to let the official record have the last word. Each parliamentary speech is met with a footnote, each government claim with a counter-example drawn from the land itself. This is not a neutral history but an intervention, one that asks its audience to see the gap between what the law says and what it does.

Reading Native Life in South Africa, I kept noticing how Plaatje’s quiet, factual outrage sat beside his longing for a fairer Britain. It reminded me of another voice, one I found later in Young India An interpretation and a history of the nationalist movement from within — Story, Setting & Ideas, where a similar ache for justice unfolds through careful, personal testimony rather than loud argument. Both felt like letters home.